Introduction

A political society composed of residents who do not agree on matters of faith, ways of belief, or manners of custom and life needs to find a way for those who live within it to be unified enough that they can coexist without ongoing violence and adhere to the same overarching rule of law. Liberalism, as a political theory, tries to articulate what the basis of this unity can be and how the basis can be found. Liberal thinkers have, in fact, proffered a number of different visions of life together in their search for a plausible, unifying political theory. In each vision, tolerance of those with whom one disagrees is an essential part of the proposed solution, just as tolerance is considered one of the indispensable values of liberal political societies today.

Liberalism and toleration have a decidedly close relationship, although each can exist and has existed without the other. John Locke is generally agreed to be the earliest thinker to make explicit the connection between them, while today one would be hard-pressed to find a liberal theorist in whose thought toleration did not feature strongly. This may, indeed, be one of the few commonalities that links contemporary liberal writers, for though in such writings toleration and liberalism seem to go hand in hand, no general consensus exists as to what either one means or entails.